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I had been relaxing, casually clad and shoeless in my three rooms and bath at Hollywood’s Spartan Apartment Hotel, during the early P.M. hours of Saturday, August 14, the night before the culmination of those events—joyous or catastrophic, depending on your point of view—which changed the world.

The minute-long hot-sell television dramas were accompanied by the latest segment of a family-situation series, but it was lousy, so I read a book while the play was on and at frequent intervals paid attention to the exciting commercials.

In them, impossibly handsome men—I was pretty sure that’s what they were—used Mmmm! shaving cream or aftershave or cologne, and got dumb looks on their faces. Then there were shots of beautiful gals with their eyes steaming and tongues going in and out, then all this dissolved into something you couldn’t be quite sure of, but looked like it was probably lots of fun, and illegal.

The message was clear that if there lived a man so reckless as to use all three of the products, one right after the other, he would be so dangerously scented he was certain to be raped by a gorgeous movie star, though whether male or female the manufacturer did not say.

So when the chimes went cling-clong, dreaming impossible dreams—I had never used the stuff, myself—I thumped to the door and pulled it open.

She was a luscious lovely of perhaps twenty-five years, give or take a warm summer or two, wearing a lightweight white linen coat open over a clinging pale green dress worn daringly high on sleek shapely legs, and plunging from her throat to what impressed me as a new high in lows. She weighed possibly fifteen pounds more than half my weight—I’m six-feet-two-inches tall and load the scales with two hundred and six pounds—and the top of her head, crowned with red-gold or maybe gold-red hair the shade of honey and hazy sunlight, came just about up to my chin. She had lazy gray eyes and lips that could cook biscuits, and a voice that buzzed like little bees stuck in hot molasses when she said:

Later I would understand why her smooth goldish or reddish brows lifted over those eyes, the color of soft gray cooing pigeons, and why her parted radioactive-red lips pursed slightly as if preparing to blow a kiss into atoms, and why the gentle intake of her breath lifted marvelous breasts higher, higher, and slowly still higher, as though in offering to gods eyeing Earth for pleasures not found on Olympus; but at that moment I was content merely to watch it happen.

You may take it as a fact, however, that never before in my thirty years, when a girl asked me my name, had I replied in a manner indicating either that I didn’t know, or that I didn’t understand the question.

She was speaking again. “Are you Mr. Scott? The private investigator—Sheldon Scott?”

She went on in the lilting bee-buzzing-lovely voice, “I’m sure my father is in very serious trouble, Mr. Scott. But I’d rather not tell you any more unless you’re willing, and able, this very minute, to help me—and him. If it’s still possible. If you can’t, I’ll have to go somewhere else—”

I sat next to her on the chocolate-brown divan in my living room, and a minute later had convinced her, or at least felt reasonably confident I had convinced her, that I was not merely available, but should she seek from one end of Earth to the other for someone to get her out of whatever difficulty she was in, there was only faint hope that she would find anybody more capable of getting her out of it as quickly as I.

While I rattled on she gazed at the two tropical fish tanks in the living-room corner, but when I stopped and beamed at her expectantly, she let those soft gray eyes sort of drift lazily to my own eyes—also gray, but more of a “steely” or “thunderous” gray, I like to think—then lifted them to examine briefly my peaked white eyebrows and the short-cropped white, but very healthy white, hair sticking up atop my head, and finally let her eyes rest on mine again.

“Nonsense,” she said. “Nobody is that good. You don’t even look like a detective.”

“Isn’t that great? Just think of the advantage that gives me over dangerous hoodlums. If I looked like a detective, the moment they lamped me I’d lose the element of surprise which helps me to outwit the dummies. The fact that I resemble a vast wasteland puts them off guard instantly, which is one reason I am still alive and so many of them are dead, or doing ten to a hundred in various closely guarded places.” I paused. “Does this mean I’m fired?”

“No,” she said briskly. “You’re hired.” She had opened a large leather bag and pulled a sheet of paper from it. “Tell me what you think of this.”

It was a handwritten note, covering half the page in a queerly jagged and tiny script that was nonetheless easy to read, the strokes clean and sharp, almost like an etching. It said:

“Drusilla, dear—I’ll be involved in a very important project for several days, so don’t worry if I fail to drop in ‘unexpectedly’ before next weekend and let you force upon me your miraculous home-cooking (could you consider Teriyaki steak for Saturday?). Dear, the combination to the floor safe in my study is 85L 12R 51L. Please remove from it the sealed manila envelope (marked ERO) and bring it to the little white house on the corner of Pine and Fifty-seventh streets in Weilton. (I’d come and get it myself, but I’m held prisoner by a mad scientist—I’ve locked myself in the bathroom.) Seriously, I do need the papers tonight—as soon as you can get them to me here. Try to make it by nine at the latest? Until Teriyaki.…”

I glanced back over it, then looked at the girl—Drusilla, I supposed. “Your father live in L.A.?”

“Well, it looks pretty much O.K.,” I said. “It’s a little odd he’d be so wrapped up in any kind of project he couldn’t go home and open his own safe. Particularly since Weilton’s only a few minutes up the Santa Ana Freeway, not far from Monterey Park. Usually people give addresses, not street corners. That’s all. The mad scientist line kind of gags me, but it doesn’t bug me.”

“Very good. That’s as much as I would have expected anybody else to notice.”

“O.K., so what’s really wrong with the note? I imagine it’s too much to assume the envelope is filled with thousand-dollar bills, and your father has been kidnapped and held for ransom, and … this is a ransom note that … isn’t supposed to look like a …”

“The envelope contains something a great deal more valuable than thousand-dollar bills.” She took the note from my hand. “Here are the things only I would know—certainly not whoever is holding my father against his will, whoever made him write this note. Dad did a brilliant job, really, considering the pressure he must have been under.” She glanced at me. “You see, there’s no question, they’ll kill him if they get the envelope. Perhaps even if they don’t.”

“No.” She shook her head rapidly. “But the note isn’t dated—that’s not like Dad. He’s very precise, dating it would be automatic. My name is Drusilla Bruno, but nobody, not even my father, ever calls me anything except Dru.”

The name “Bruno” tickled my mind, but she was going on. “Dad loves my cooking, but hates Teriyaki steak. He intimates he’ll see me when I deliver the envelope, but his last words are ‘Until Teriyaki,’ which of course would be next Saturday. The most important thing though, is that I already know the combination to Dad’s safe. And this isn’t it.”

I leaned over and looked at the paper in her hand, got out my notebook and pen, jotted down 85L 12R 51L, and underneath it letters of the alphabet corresponding to the numbers. I wound up with HE AB EA. Then I crossed out AB and replaced it with L, for the twelfth letter of the alphabet.

“I’ve done all that,” she said. “Every which way. Nothing made sense.”

“No, that’s not the way Dad’s mind works. He’d already said ‘Help’ by writing the wrong combination, and half a dozen other things. I’m sure he’s trying to tell me something, somewhere in that letter, but I just don’t know what it is. Probably I’m … too upset.” She was silent a moment, then she went on, “Don’t concentrate on the ‘mad scientist’ thing. He is a scientist, but he isn’t mad. Although lately enough people have been trying to say he is.”

I’d taken out a cigarette and was starting to put it between my lips when it hit me. I didn’t realize I had suddenly tightened my fingers until bits of tobacco fell from the broken cigarette onto my trousers.

I looked at her. “Drusilla … Bruno. And your father’s a scientist? He isn’t—”

I let the crumpled cigarette drop. Just let it drop onto my yellow-gold carpet. Then I got out another one, lit it, stood up, walked over to the fish tanks, and looked at the brightly colored Neons and Raspboras and Guppies and the cornflower-blue Betta I’d raised from an egg. I glanced at my watch. Ten minutes after nine. And according to the note, Dru was supposed to “Try to make it by nine.” No way.

For about a minute, while I stood in front of the fish tanks, there was silence. Dru didn’t say anything as I reviewed part of the history, some of it extraordinary, of recent days.…

The name Emmanuel Bruno, only twelve months ago less widely known than that of Elvira Snull, who had lived alone growing beans in the Ozarks for forty-two years before being discovered by an Internal Revenue agent, was now a name almost as instantly recognizable to the man on the street as his own. At least it was if he read newspapers or listened to radio or watched television, or probably if he merely went to church once in a while.

For Emmanuel Bruno, an ex-MD who had been kicked out of the AMA but who in his lifetime had become many other kinds of “Doctor,” an infuriatingly opinionated yet paradoxically open-minded genius without enough sense to conceal his irreverence for orthodoxy, authority, dogma, and even reverence, was the developer—inventor, discoverer, formulator—of Erovite. And few experiments in the history of human trial and error have caused more unexpected comment and commotion, more hueing and crying, more praises for and inveighing against, since the day when Adam first whispered to Eve, “So who’s going to know about it?”

You would almost think Erovite had something to do with s-e-x, wouldn’t you? Well, there, as the old phrase goes, was the rub. It was known that Bruno had, during research occupying many years of his life, developed a liquid formula, apparently filled with all kinds of strange gunks, which had—for not quite twelve months—been marketed by a small local pharmaceutical company as a tonic, alleged to be a euphoriant, harmless but effective psychic energizer, and even a possible cure for, or at least alleviative of, many ills that afflict mankind.

During the first two or three months after the product went on sale across the country, it appeared that Erovite did indeed do most, or at least much, of what the manufacturer—and Emmanuel Bruno—claimed for it. If the stories that then began to appear could be believed, encouraging and occasionally remarkable, if not actually astonishing, results were reported by most of those who used Erovite for more than a few weeks.

In virtually all cases a similar pattern was reported: a gradual increase of energy and sense of well-being, greater alertness, even what many insisted was a detectable improvement of memory and mental acuity. After more prolonged use, habitual catnappers required less sleep, while insomniacs began drifting to slumberland minutes after their heads hit the pillows. Such real or imagined troubles as “the nerves,” “low back pain,” “rheumatiz,” and “the blahs” diminished, for some disappeared entirely. All this at a time when Orthodox Medicine, despite its near success in eliminating disease, death, and decay entirely, found itself faced with millions of citizens sicker than dogs, many of whom perversely keeled over and died like flies dipped in medically safe DDT.

But worse was to come. For, finally, toward the end of the period when Erovite was available to all who could afford to pay forty dollars a bottle, the most dramatic and hard to believe—and apparently unforgivable and impermissible—developments occurred, or at least were reported. Not only did many imbibers of Erovite report complete recovery from various minor ailments and apparent immunity to common colds and the variously named and numbered “flus,” but here and there across the land isolated individuals began to claim improvement in their previously chronic or incurable illnesses.

This, of course, was an impossibility. An incurable illness is, according to no less an authority than the American Medical Association, incurable. It follows that nothing can cure such an illness, not quacks, herbalists, pharmacognosists, elves, faith healers, or even God, so certainly the incurable could not be cured by so simple a thing as a combination of various gunks named Erovite.

It is helpful to recognize that, in the lexicon of Organized Medicine, an incurable disease is any malaise, sickness, trauma, external or internal rash or disorder, or other condition unaccompanied by rigor mortis, which cannot be cast out by a duly licensed graduate of an AMA-approved medical school. Anyone not an MD, who by design or accident cures a chronic or incurable disease, is a quack or an elf, who therefore must be—in order to protect the sick and dying from his unethical and unlicensed greed—prevented from experimenting upon people, and if possible imprisoned, so that his illegal actions may be punished and the people may be safe. And may return to their MD’s, who have pronounced their diseases incurable, for proper treatment.

So, those individuals popping up across the land like human corks bobbing to the surface in a sea of misery, to claim among other things that long-stiff arthritic joints were loosening and pain was diminishing, that a skin cancer was visibly and unmistakably shrinking, that bone-deep weariness was lessening as energy returned, that approaching evidences of senility were in slow but sure retreat, could not be other than grievously mistaken.

In the official AMA view there existed only three possible explanations for the increasingly numerous reports of such improvement or cure. First, the individual, not being a trained diagnostician, was deluded and only imagined improvement, or else there had been nothing wrong with him in the first place. Second, if he’d really been sick and was now less sick, the improvement was due to “spontaneous remission,” which is a medical term meaning he’s-better-but-quit-bugging-me-about-it. Or, third, the improvement was due to the delayed but happy result of previous treatment by a medical doctor, perhaps in 1940.

Such a subversive and probably poisonous substance as Erovite, then, would have to be carefully tested and examined by medical doctors and researchers, possibly for as long as a hundred years. There was sudden and quite violent opposition to the unrestricted sale of Erovite. The possible dangers inherent in its continued use were discussed at great length via newspapers, magazines, radio, and television. Increasingly it was denounced by experts and others who know about such things. Erovite, and Emmanuel Bruno, were in trouble.

But that trouble, emanating from Organized Medicine—from the AMA and the FDA and the Department of HEW and other concerned alphabets and individuals—was as nothing compared to the fury and denunciation and threats of damnation that, at first temperately but with gathering might and mania as the months wore on, were hurled against Bruno and Erovite by God Almighty. Or, rather, by the Almighty’s spokesmen on Earth, which is the same thing.

In sum, Bruno was being attacked not only by the leaders of Organized Medicine but by the leaders of Organized Religion as well. Could a man possibly have found himself in a more precarious position, unless tied to a stake with the faggots lit and pierced by a poisoned caduceus?

Well, there was a reason for this part of it, too. At the same time when rational doubt was weakening much medical dogma, the Church—not entirely, but primarily the Christian Church—was finding its Omniscience and Authority being increasingly questioned. And, interestingly, questioned for very similar reasons. To make matters worse, there was in progress what was alleged to be a sexual revolution.

In the official Church view, sexual revolutions are not good. The Church takes a very dim view of sexual revolutions. Some say it takes a very dim view of sexual anythings. Yet there was arising what many considered a saner, healthier view to replace the rack on which sex had been stretched for upward of sixteen centuries. More and more of the faithful were wondering why, if sex was taboo and sinful in so many terrible ways, as they had been solemnly assured by God’s spokesmen, God Himself had made it so stupendously delicious. Certainly it wasn’t painful. At least, not usually.

For one fact about Erovite soon became strikingly evident: whether or not it made people feel better or worse, whether or not it cured or killed them, it was, unquestionably, an astonishingly potent aphrodisiac.

As practically everybody knows, an aphrodisiac is a euphemism for “lots of fun,” but it is commonly thought of as a substance which, when ingested, gives rise to inner and even outer tumult, to lascivious thought, venery, tumescence, and palpitations, to thoughts of and desire for sexual downfall. Inevitably, when thumping and burning with such palpitations and desires, many so afflicted did, in their weakness, indulge in the act which temporarily obsessed them as a swell idea.

Long before this, long before, the Church had made it clear to all with ears to hear or eyes to see that it was strength to use those ears for hearing and eyes for seeing, even to joyously employ legs and arms and noses for functions natural to legs and arms and noses, but it was always carnal weakness and often an abomination to use the organs of sex for sex, they somehow being more carnal than carnal ears and eyes and noses, which may seem strange, but is all right, for the Church works in strange ways its wonders to perform.

Thus when reports began to come in about men delighting—or occasionally terrifying—their wives, or vice-versa as sometimes occurred when a woman had been on Erovite for a few weeks and her hubby had not; and of individuals slowly waking to wide-eyed libidinousness after an apparently total sexual anesthesia of years; or of prodigious feats of evil which almost had to be lies; and of that now famous orgy in the old folks’ home, why, then, you can bet your boots, it became plain to those who care deeply about such things that something had to be done to stop this spreading evil lest the stiffs rise up in mortuaries and begin eyeing each other lustfully. Better that all the stiffs should stay dead; for why gain life only to lose it?

Some were taken in by this argument. Some were not. But if sheer volume of sound and words and fury could have carried the day, those who proposed the argument would surely have carried it well out of sight; for, although there were minor disagreements, once the truth about Erovite’s appalling ability to increase the power and strength and vigor of man’s sexual desires and abilities—apparently raising his lower nature higher than it had ever been before, maybe even raising it almost as high as his higher nature—all those opposed to, or fearful of, or even kind of suspicious of sex, spoke out against it as one.

Except for Festus Lemming—whose voice was the loudest of all, who volcanically damned sex of any kind, sex right-side-up or upside-down or sideways or back-to-back, with your clothes on, and who denounced at great and intimate length every conceivable nuance of sex, taking as his text and authority the Holy Bible—nobody suggested in public that Emmanuel Bruno should be stoned to death without delay.

Others in the holy chorus dwelled somewhat less on sex, but paid at least as much, if not more, attention to Bruno and Erovite. It was agreed that every atom of Erovite should be destroyed, but as for Bruno they could not, being good Christians mostly, go so far as to agree completely with Lemming’s suggestion. Something, of course, would have to be done about Bruno, but the mind of mere man could not think of anything sufficiently horrible. So, God would have to do it.

That, basically, was the message, and it came in loud and clear from first a hundred and then a thousand pulpits and ecclesiastical podiums. Priests and preachers and pastors and innumerable minor popes reared back and roared, at first in isolation, individually, and at last in one great booming mass. The Church spoke, and it spoke in a voice of thunder.

Condensed—much condensed—the message was: as for sex, any kind of it was a dubious virtue; and it rampant and unrestricted by properly appointed restrictors was very bad; thus Erovite, which led to more of it when there should be less of it, was very bad; and Emmanuel Bruno was anathema, doubled and redoubled.

In the past four or five weeks, aside from the hullabaloo about Erovite itself, two names had been spoken and shouted and screeched and sung; perhaps more than any other two names in a similar span of time throughout history. One, of course, was Emmanuel Bruno. The other was his chief opponent, the now-number-one spokesman for the forces of decency and the angels, Festus Lemming—but we’ll get to Festus later.

I stood in front of the tropical fish tanks for a few more seconds, watching the guppies poking each other’s lower natures, then turned and walked back to my chocolate-brown divan and looked at Drusilla.

By nine-fifteen P.M. I had put on my shoes—I’d been lolling before the television set in canary yellow socks, and slacks, of course, and a loosely knitted short-sleeved white sports shirt—and strapped on my gun harness, fully loaded Colt .38 Special snug in its clamshell holster. Carrying a cashmere jacket that matched the slacks and socks, I walked from my bedroom into the living room, feeling dressed to watch a tennis match, but probably not for what I was going to do. Probably not, because I still hadn’t the faintest idea what I was going to do.

Dru and I had carried on a short question-and-answer session during the two or three minutes I spent in the bedroom—it did seem a shame that the first time I spoke to her in my bedroom she was in the living room—and I’d learned a little more not only about Erovite but of events immediately preceding her arrival at my door.

She lived in a suite at the Westchester Arms in Los Angeles, her father in Monterey Park just a hop outside of L.A. Earlier this evening she’d spent some time with her father at his home. Near sundown he had received a phone call from a Mr. Strang and soon afterward left to meet him. Dru drove to her suite, where perhaps an hour later a messenger delivered the note she’d shown me. By the time Dru read the message, the boy who’d brought it was long gone.

I sat by her on the divan, lit a cigarette, and said, “O.K., all we’ve got, so far, is the note and the call from this guy Strang. What did he want? He a friend of your father’s?”

“Not exactly a friend. And I only heard Dad’s part of the conversation, then Dad told me he had to go meet André, Mr. Strang, at the church. If he hadn’t told me—”

“—I wouldn’t have known where he was going. You see, until the FDA banned Erovite it was produced by the Cassiday and Quince Pharmaceutical Company here in Los Angeles, and Dave Cassiday is an old friend of Dad’s. When opposition to the sale of Erovite reached such ghastly proportions—it got really awful by early June, you know, just before that ding-dong preacher launched his SOS Crusade—”

“That who? Ding-dong … wait. SOS, that’s Save Our Souls, isn’t it? Ye Gods, don’t tell me—”

“—Dave and my father discussed the situation and concluded it would be at least helpful and possibly essential to have some idea of what that ding-dong was likely to do or say next. Both my father and Dave Cassiday were acquainted with Mr. Strang and knew he’d expressed dissatisfaction with conditions in the local Eden, even hinted that he was on the verge of breaking with the Church entirely. So Dave managed to enlist him as a sort of, well, I suppose you’d call him an ‘undercover’ man, someone who could keep them informed—”

I spoke rather sharply, and she managed to shut up. I didn’t really have to ask the question. My suspicions almost confirmed themselves.

“Church,” I said. “Ding-dong, SOS, Eden, I’ll bet a whole collection basket you’re referring to the Church of the Second—”

Festus Lemming was the founder, organizer, leader, and ding-dong—that was not his official title—of the Church of the Second Coming, a collection of ecclesiastical fruitcakes that had to be described as the major religious success story of the twentieth century.

Seven years ago there had been no Church of the Second Coming. Seven years ago nobody except possibly his mum and dad had heard of Festus Lemming. But seven years ago the Church—and Festus Lemming—had been born.

It was said that Festus Lemming had seen the light—quite literally. While out walking, he had fallen down, in what some later claimed was an epileptic seizure, on the road to Pasadena, and he was swept up into the Seventh Heaven where, among others, he met silent-screen stars Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, who told him they were swell; even more important, simultaneously the Holy Ghost descended upon him and he experienced a vision in which he saw and thus knew the Truth, whereupon he was transformed, informed, and born anew. From that moment it became Lemming’s duty, as well as almost maniacal desire, to lay the Truth upon a myriad of sinners enmeshed in the carnality and materialism of a suffering world, to share with all mankind that Message which he, and perhaps he alone, possessed in its entirety.

It was said of this transcendental experience that it had occurred to Festus Lemming seven years past, on the fifteenth day of August, on the road to Pasadena. It was said because Lemming said it. How else could it be? Who else could have said it? It had occurred only to Lemming, therefore, nobody else could have known about it; obviously, then, only he could inform the world of this wonder. And it was unquestionably a wonder, for when he had told others of it many of them believed in him and before you could say Hallelujah his followers had grown from one to two, then to twenty, then to ten thousand, and now in August on the very eve of the seventh anniversary of his Enlightenment they numbered three million or more. This in a period when membership in most other churches declined.

So today there were branches, or Edens, of the Church of the Second Coming in most major cities of the U.S.A., with the Los Angeles County Eden, or headquarters of the entire Church, centered in a soaring new four-million-dollar House of God in Weilton, Southern California. The founder’s correct title, rarely used except on formal occasions or in letters to backsliders, was “The Sainted Most-Holy Pastor” Festus Lemming. There was only one of those. All other officials of the Church—the important ones, anyway—were also termed “Sainted” but, in descending order, the lesser Pastors were designated as More-Holy, Holy, Less-Holy, and Least-Holy. But even the Least was Holy and Sainted. André Strang, for example, as I learned from Dru, was fairly high up the ladder, being, in the Los Angeles County Eden, the Sainted Less-Holy Pastor Strang.

I said to Dru, “The way Lemming’s been throwing everything but the altar candlesticks at your father, I wouldn’t have thought he’d go within ten miles of Weilton, much less the church.”

“Ordinarily he wouldn’t have. But with the climax of Lemming’s campaign against Erovite and Dad, his SOS Crusade—and even his big Announcement—all less than twenty-four hours away, this is no ordinary time. And anything Strang could tell Dad might be very important now.”

“Well … no, not really. Dad said it was, and I hardly think he’d have been mistaken about the person he was talking to.”

“This envelope he mentions, marked ERO, I suppose that must have something to do with Erovite.”

“Just about everything to do with it. The essence of Dad’s notes, records, history of his experiments for over twenty years, everything—from the very beginning through all the steps in development and final formulation of Erovite—is in that envelope. I’m sure you realize, if the FDA ban is removed, and there’s some chance it may happen, the information in that envelope could be worth millions of dollars to whoever possesses it.” She paused. “Even billions, if you want my, and Dad’s, opinion.”

She looked at me with a slight smile curving those reckless-red lips. “Everything claimed for it, and more. You can’t judge the value of anything from the words of its detractors alone, or what’s said by those having no personal acquaintance with the thing. And that is especially true of Erovite, Mr. Scott.”

She nodded. “The early medical opposition caused much difficulty, but when it became known that Erovite was such a lovely sexual stimulant, it was the religious opposition, particularly the Fundamentalist-Christian opposition, that made the situation impossible.”

She blinked. “Of course. As I told you earlier, I certainly did not deliver the envelope. I’m convinced anyone who’d do this to get the formula would also kill Dad once they got it. But I did drive back to Dad’s home in Monterey Park, in case anyone was watching the house, spent a few minutes inside and came out carrying an envelope. Then I drove here.”

“Dad once mentioned if he ever got into real trouble he’d like to have you around. He said you impressed him as a most ingenious and capable brute.”

“He also has an idea you’re his kind of man, as he put it, full of life and lusty, half-pagan, and you always seem to come out on top somehow, no matter what dumb things you do.”

“That’s all of real importance I can tell you, Shell.” She leaned closer and put one hand over mine. I would have sworn I could feel the hot beat of the pulse in her palm, going thump-thump-thump on the back of my hand. “What do you plan to do?”

“Yeah, sure. I’ll run around the block—ah, in Weilton, of course, that’s what I’ll do. The corner there, which is mentioned in the note.” I took the note from my pocket. “I will, as well, also be trying to decipher these hieroglyphics. And while in Weilton, if as I expect, I fail to find Doctor Bruno standing on the corner, I shall visit the Church of the Second Coming, because that is where your father said he was going, and it is so far as we know the last place where he may have been seen—seen in public.”

“That’s what I would suggest.” Dru removed her hand from mine. “And you’d better get started, hadn’t you?”

I watched her hot hand as it moved through the air and came to rest in her lap, which was probably even hotter.

Just a hop and a skip out of L.A. you take a right—toward the sea—at the Santa Ana Freeway, and a few miles farther along you’ll see a sign.

Yes, you’ll see it—none who have passed that way except the totally blind or unconscious have yet failed to see it—and even if you get only a glimpse you will be able to read the letters of flaming gold, a product of man’s genius with electricity and neon and various other appropriate gasses, which proclaim:

That is what it said. And it had given many people a chill when they considered, if the message were true, how many were the things for which they had better repent. Combined with the chill was a full measure of anxiety and suspense, for if these were the last days nobody knew how many of them might be left, nobody except Festus Lemming. He knew. But he had not told anybody else yet. He was going to, however. He was going to tell everybody about it on the seventh anniversary of his Enlightenment, on the evening of the fifteenth of August, or—tomorrow night.

Even without that interesting message, Lemming would have been assured of enormous attention, not merely from the approximately four thousand members of his own congregation and the three million souls in his Church, but from the citizenry at large as well. For tomorrow night would also mark the climax of his two-month-long campaign against Emmanuel Bruno, against Erovite, against sex, against sin, against filth and indecency and everything spiritually soiled or smudged.

Those not instantly informed by the name Festus had given to his Church, or by the flashing sign on the Santa Ana Freeway, had been informed of his message either by Lemming himself or reports in the press, radio, and television. Basically Lemming proclaimed—and vowed this was the very heart of the revelation he had experienced on the road to Pasadena—that these days were the “last days” prophesied in the Scriptures; that these were the days when predicted riots and upheavals and tumult and sin and evil did stalk the land; the days of wars and rumors of wars, of nation rising against nation, and famines and pestilences and earthquakes in divers places as foretold in Matthew and elsewhere. That, in sum, the time of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ was now, or at least soon, was very soon, was almost now, and the Lord was about to come to Earth again in order to save it from otherwise inevitable and imminent destruction.

Whether Festus sincerely believed this or not, and there is no need to doubt that he did, it was undeniable that most members of his Church, and undoubtedly a great many more people who had heard of the message, did believe it. They believed because they feared these days of upheaval might be the real Last Days, and because Festus Lemming proclaimed it to be true, and because he was a most persuasive and convincing and devout vegetarian celibate who constantly spoke out against sin and evil, but mainly because he had experienced a vision on the road to Pasadena.

All this helped explain why Lemming and the members of his Church were so greatly exercised about Erovite and Emmanuel Bruno. The Sainted Most-Holy Pastor had for seven years made it abundantly clear that it was his duty and the duty of the Church and all of its members, in preparation for the Second Coming of the Lord, to sweep the Earth clean of sin. If this was not done and done speedily, the Earth would not be pure enough or clean enough, and the Lord would not come, and Earth would perish.

Sin was, however, in the view of Festus Lemming, almost entirely of the flesh, of the evil carnal body, and naturally the most doubly sinful sin of all was sexual sin, which usually required two evil carnal bodies for a single sinning. Consequently, along with his warnings and pronouncements of imminent doom, a doom which those so pure as to be without spot or blemish would escape through Divine intervention—though the rest of us, the ones with a little spot or blemish, would be condemned forever to the everlasting hots—there was much talk by Lemming of sin all over the place, this accompanied by many phrases like “fornicators and whoremongers” and “O ye accursed fornicators and whoremongers!” and “… into the flames of eternal Hell shall be cast the fornicators and whoremongers!” He really had it in for the fornicators and whoremongers.

One can easily understand, then, the dismay of Festus Lemming when, not long after the appearance of Erovite in drugstores, sources both medical and lay began to report and then confirm its astonishing effects upon human sexuality. At the precise moment when it was necessary that the world be clean, cleaner, cleanest, a flood of filth was inundating the land.

It came to Festus that if this monster was not killed while it was still little, it might soon become an adult that could not be slain; Earth would become lousy with fornicators; and the world would therefore end, not as he envisioned, with a whimper, but with a terrible bang. Further, since Erovite in large measure would be responsible for all of those fornicators, and Emmanuel Bruno was responsible for Erovite, it followed with rigid logic that Bruno was the greatest whoremonger of all time. It was a serious charge. But it was Lemming’s duty to make it, and he did not shrink from his duty.

Atop the sign an arrow flamed and flickered, much larger but much like those that Indians used to light and shoot into forts, and as I turned in the direction indicated, right off the freeway onto Filbert Street, it occurred to me—oddly enough, for the first time—that a greedy man enmeshed in the carnal and material life might kidnap and hold Bruno in the hope of acquiring his formula for Erovite and from it making a great many millions of dollars; but it was also possible that a man less greedy and not enmeshed in the carnal and material life, a man more spiritual, a man more humble, meek, long-suffering, and righteous, would kidnap Bruno and attempt thus to acquire his formula in order that both it and Bruno might then be destroyed and the world saved from sin. Certainly saving the world was a finer thing to do than making lots of money.

I passed the two-lane asphalt road, lined with tall poplars and bearing the wonderful name “Heavenly Lane,” gently rising toward the Church of the Second Coming two or three hundred yards away on my right, and drove on into Weilton. It took only a couple of minutes to reach Pine and Fifty-seventh and then park around the corner a block away. Another five minutes to walk silently back to the house—it was a small white house—on the northwest corner. And two minutes at most to become certain I was entirely alone. Nobody was there at all, either outside the house or inside.

Nearby I found a For Sale sign, and in the front lawn a hole from which, probably earlier this evening, the sign had been pulled. So there was little doubt someone had waited here, in the near darkness, not long before.

In the Cad, I read Bruno’s note to his daughter once again, played with numbers and letters, looked for clues in words and phrases and found not a clue. So I drove back down Filbert to Heavenly Lane and up the poplar-lined road. Soon on my left were visible row upon row of cars, hundreds of them, parked in a spacious lot. The road veered right, swung left—and there it was.

The Church of the Second Coming appeared with surprising and impressive suddenness, dead ahead and well above me. Green lawn sloped upward to flower beds, and then, stark in the glare of a dozen floodlights, the white face of the church loomed. It rose toward the sky for a hundred and fifty feet, its width no more than half that, a solid white wall without ornament or interruption other than the almost fragile-looking cross of gold one hundred feet from top to bottom with a thin horizontal bar thirty-feet wide toward its top. Beneath the base of the cross the great doors of the church were open wide in welcome.

I parked my Cad in the lot, and as I walked back toward the lights, while still fifty yards from those open doors, I could hear the familiar voice booming and roaring. Familiar, though I had not met Festus Lemming, because I had heard parts of messages he regularly delivered on television, not merely on Sunday morn but—during the past month—in evening prime time. It was a quite distinctive voice, anyhow. Once heard, like once hit on the ear with a claw hammer, it was an experience impossible to dismiss lightly.

I walked up a dozen pebbled cement steps and through the doors, then stepped a few feet to my right and leaned against the wall, taking a few moments to adjust to my first view of the church’s interior, and of Lemming and his flock in the flesh.

The interior of the church was much larger than I had expected. It was not so very wide, but it was very deep, which is, I suppose, the way a church should be. Its approximately seventy-five-foot width, except for an open eight-foot-wide aisle slanting downward and bisecting the building and a narrower aisle at each wall, was filled with worshippers seated shoulder to shoulder, crammed together on backless benches.

From where I stood, in the rear of the church, I could of course see none of the smiling faces, only row upon row of massed and rapt Christians, clad mostly, if not entirely, in black or dark blue or gray; row upon row of motionless backs and expressionless heads. Motionless, yes; and rapt, yes; for all heads were aimed at and all eyes fixed on the Sainted Most-Holy Pastor as he gladdened their eyes and ruined their ears, and heads, with his message.

I heard him before I saw him—of course, I’d heard him while still in the parking lot—and I let my eyes find the source of that marvelous sound. My gaze went down the middle aisle, down and down and far, to a wall of pearly-gate gray—a wall not of wood but of cloth, hanging gray curtains or draperies—and then up. There he was, way down there at the other end of the church, but elevated on a podium high enough so that even those of us in back had to lift up our eyes to see him. Whether or not this was designed to induce eyestrain in all, it almost surely produced a lot of stiff necks among those seated in the front rows, from where it appeared likely they would have to look straight up in order to see his nostrils.

Festus Lemming wore no robe, no gown of black or white or scarlet, no symbol-covered apron or even impressive mitre. No such folderol for him. He wore a simple business suit made of hammered gold with ruby crosses for buttons. Lights from spots focused upon him bounced and glittered from his golden threads, sparkled as he moved and waved his arms and mouth, as the sun might have glinted from the chain mail of a Crusader setting forth to chop up infidels for God, an infidel being one who rejected the Christian faith, particularly that part of it which required the chopping-up of infidels.

Even with the vast quantity of light bathing him, so that he appeared to be throwing little sunspots into his corona, Lemming resembled a golden icicle, gradually melting away. I had seen him on television, and on one other occasion in person at fairly close range. He was very short, only three or four inches over five feet, and so thin that upon first lamping him I’d thought it at least possible if he stepped on a scale and its needle did not move he wouldn’t be certain the scale was busted. Even then he’d given me the impression of being a wraith, an icy shade that might in a dim light—or a strong light, any kind of light—melt away entirely.

This impression did not, however, apply to his voice. Festus Lemming’s was a voice that might never fade away, that might, though getting gradually weaker, keep on going to the ends of the Earth and continue as at least a faint whisper among the farthest stars. It was as though he spoke not with the mouth of an ordinary mortal but with a flesh cannon made from lungs, lips, teeth, tongue, tonsils, and musical buzz-saws.

From that anatomical marvel he shot forth balls and volleys of phrases and sentences, shrapnel of biblical quotes and misquotes, cannonades of verses and chapters and possibly whole testaments, all of it mixed with revivalist humdingers that seemed to bounce from the walls and ceiling and floor and, even slowed down by all that, to pierce eardrums and occasionally stun whole people.

For a few seconds, instead of listening to the almost symphonic tones and chords and arpeggios of Lemming’s voice, I concentrated upon what he was saying, thinking perhaps even I, by putting skepticism aside and paying close attention, might learn something of infinite value.

“You, Mary, ever Virgin,” he was crescendoing—and that kind of put me off right there—“make us understand the paradoxical essence of this state of celibacy.… Yes! We know it is … a SUPERHUMAN VIRTUE which needs supernatural support! Make us also understand its worth, its heroism, beauty, joy, and strength … the strength and honor of a ministry without reservation—Yes! THE CRUCIFIXION OF THE FLESH.… The unconditional SOLDIERING of the Kingdom of God. Help us … to love … like this! YES!”

As often before, when I’d chanced to hear top-forty songs, I wished I’d continued to concentrate on the music instead of the lyrics. And not merely because the message failed to make me feel all good and warm inside, but because Lemming was not delivering an original sermon but quoting, with minor embellishments, God’s remarks on Sacred Celibacy which had, years before, been delivered for Him by Pope Paul VI.

So much for learning something of infinite value, I thought, and glanced at my watch. It was three minutes till ten P.M. With any luck, Lemming would take a break at ten. In both outer aisles, three-quarters of the way down toward the front, stood a man—or maybe woman; from this distance it was difficult to be sure—wearing what looked like an official outfit or uniform. I checked the individual on my right more closely. The outfit was an ankle-length robe or curtain of pearly-gate gray, snug around the neck, and with an insignia or design on the sleeves. On the person’s head was a covering, something like a large shower cap.

It seemed possible that one did not easily gain an interview with the Sainted Most-Holy Pastor, perhaps not at all without the intercession of an intermediary. And I, not a member of the Church by a long shot, would probably need all the help I could get. So I walked to the aisle on my right and started moving slowly down it, as unobtrusively as I could.

I made the halfway mark with no trouble, and paused there to take my first good look at the assembled congregation of the Church of the Second Coming—or, rather, my first look, for to me there was nothing good about it. I could clearly see some hundreds of the approximately four thousand members present, and it was a sight to sore eyes. It may be that I looked upon them with already biased and prejudiced glimmers, and thus saw not only what was actually there but what I expected to see as well. Still, I think even a totally unbiased and unprejudiced observer would have concluded they were a sad-looking lot.

As for me, there was no doubt whatsoever in my mind that I had never before beheld such a joyless, juiceless, loveless and lifeless gang of withered, weary, and dried-up ding-a-lings. Knocking off ninety percent for the possibility of my personal warps, there were still very few of them who looked fully alive, and some who appeared to have been deceased for a number of years.